New foodie app is spot on

Facebook asks, "What's on your mind?" Twitter wonders, "What are you doing?" Foursquare wants to know where you are. Flickr wants to see what photographs you're taking. Now, there's Foodspotting and the questions are: What are you eating and where?

Foodspotters post photos of their fave dishes on the site to share with others hungry for the same sort of thing, which is why Foodspotting's motto is "Find dishes, not just restaurants."

Launched in mid-January, Foodspotting now lists 15,000 foods "spotted" by 5,000 registered users, according to Alexa Andrzejewski, the application's San Francisco-based co-founder.

Andrzejewski came up with the idea after visiting Japan and Korea. She discovered many foods and decided people need to learn what's out there, like Japanese foods that are not sushi. She also discovered there was no easy way to find out where to get that food once you want it.

"So we started Foodspotting to create a better way for people to learn about new foods and find them using their mobile phone," she explained. "With existing guides, finding food can feel a little bit too much like research. With the Foodspotting app, you can just launch the app and see the foods around you. … It's more like looking in a bakery window. It's like window-shopping for food."

The app allows you to zero in on a dish by searching by name or by neighborhood. You can win "reputation points" whenever someone "wants" what you ate or nominates it as a great dish. As with Foursquare, you can earn "expert" badges.

Andrzejewski has big plans for Foodspotting.

"We want it to be a whole ecosystem of sites and even events and activities down the road,'' she said. "We don't mind if ‘foodspotter' becomes a generic word for people who take pictures of their food."